Garrett Morris on SNL‘s First Season: ‘You Have to Be Very Brave to Make Fun of a Lot of What Should Be Made Fun of’

I had been in show business for about 17 years before Saturday Night Live came along. I was an actor on and off Broadway. I wrote a couple plays, and I did a lot of musicals. SNL was my first television job—a job paying me more than I had ever been paid before, and I was finally paying my rent.

I’m an introvert, so I would usually just do the show and go back to my apartment. This was a mistake, because what you’re supposed to do is go to the bar, hang out with the group, and develop relationships. There were some drugs—I was a cocaine fiend, but a teetotaler when it came to alcohol.

But back on set, being the one Black guy, I was just concerned about whether I’d be used at all. It was not an unusual experience to be the one Black person in a cast of mostly white people. I had to fight to get people to write for me. Lorne Michaels came up with the premise of a sketch featuring guys on death row performing as the “Death Row Follies.” All he had was a premise. We had to go to our dressing room and come up with something. I remembered this scene from Art Linkletter, a very popular talk-show host in the 1950s, where a white lady from down South sang, “I’m gonna get me a shotgun and shoot all the n-----s I see.” I realized if I replaced n----- with whitey, I would have the perfect song for a Black man on death row. So that’s how I came up with that sketch.

I also was proud of the fact that I came up with the idea for the “White Guilt Relief Fund” sketch. There was a running joke in the Black community about groups like the Black Panthers, SNCC, CORE, the NAACP, who would regularly go out fundraising. All-Black groups got some money, but groups that had a goodly amount of white liberals got much more. People are still arguing about whether there should be reparations for slavery, and the idea of a “White Guilt Relief Fund” was a way of talking about a very serious economic subject in a comedic way. Whether you were a Democrat or a Republican, you got hit by the comedy of SNL. Now, the whole country is sort of sideways, so you have to be very brave to make fun of a lot of what should be made fun of. It doesn’t seem quite as courageous as it was then.

There was a lot of energy, and a lot of beautiful people. I was just amazed at the brilliance of the improvisation—Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Chevy Chase. They were all just such talented people, and I was really honored to be a part of that group.—As told to Olivia B. Waxman